I can tell you that testing a build is a major pain due to the huge turnaround time for new builds. You should worry about libreadline-support (if you have it installed, did the bootstrap get linked to it? If not, is readline support okay?) Can you run HelloWorld? I'd strongly suggest building DARCS and using it as a test Previously we build with stage=2, I think I had to raise it to 3 for some reason (GHCi).